A coolly funny stylist ... Dyer’s memoir is a funny and often painful book that both follows and departs from the traditional working-class bildungsroman. It offers, perhaps, a stranger account than even Dyer quite allows: at times, a wounded narrative pretending not to be ... All this is delivered in Dyer’s familiar mode of extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration ... I found myself laughing with scandalized delight at my little shocks of recognition.
Both a captivating portrait of the artist as a young man and an insightful snapshot of postwar Britain ... Episodes are so brilliantly relayed ... Dyer’s most absorbing recollections are those concerning his foray into books. But his most satisfying depictions are of his humble, private, and resolutely unbookish parents ... A vibrant trip down memory lane. There might be little in the way of tension or drama in the form of growing pains or teenage angst, but there is no shortage of candid and beguiling recollections of scrapes, shenanigans, success, and self-discoveries.
It’s coherent, or maybe stable is a better word, free of the comical overstatement and fictional swerving that characterize Dyer’s other books. It’s formally recognizable in pretty much every way. It is also extremely good ... Beautiful.
